A half-hearted tap at the door made Mullett’s heart skip a beat. This had to be Frost, annoyingly prompt for once. The door was flung open before he could say ‘Enter’ and Frost shambled in, a cigarette drooping from his mouth, ash snowflaking down the front of his jacket and on to the newly vacuumed blue Wilton carpet.
‘You wanted to see me, Super?’ asked Frost, the waggling cigarette shedding more ash. What the hell was this all about? he wondered. Mullett looked even more shifty and devious than ever.
‘Er – yes,’ said Mullett, checking his watch.
Where the devil was Skinner? ‘Take a seat.’ He indicated a hard-seated chair he had placed some way from his desk.
‘Thanks,’ grunted Frost, ignoring the offered chair and dragging a more comfortable visitor’s chair from the wall over to Mullett’s desk, positioning it next to the in-tray. Mullett hastily took a heavy glass ashtray from his drawer and slid it across, just too late to stop another shower of ash descending on his gleaming desktop.
‘Sorry, Super,’ grunted Frost, blowing the offending ash all over the place. He leant back in his chair. ‘What did you want to see me about? Only I’m a bit pushed for time.’
Mullett fiddled with his fountain pen and patted some papers into shape to gain time. He wasn’t ready to answer that question yet. It really was too bad of Skinner. Where on earth was he…?
A polite tap at the door made him sigh with relief. ‘Enter,’ he called and Detective Chief Inspector Skinner strode purposefully into the room, giving a smile to Mullett and a curt nod to Frost.
Mullett waved apologetically at the hard chair he had intended for Frost. Skinner dragged it behind Mullett’s desk so he could sit next to the Superintendent, edging Mullett from the centre position.
‘If you could kindly spare us a few moments of your valuable time, Inspector,’ said Mullett sarcastically as Frost nudged the in-tray round, trying to read the name on the ‘Request for Transfer’ form. A bit of gossip to share with Bill Wells.
‘Sure,’ said Frost graciously, tearing his eyes away. ‘But if you could be quick – some of us have got work to do.’ He stared pointedly at his watch, then beamed up at Mullett’s bleak, worried smile and Skinner’s grim frown. Then it was Frost’s turn to frown. With a jolt he recognised the wad of papers Skinner was holding. Flaming heck! They were his monthly car expenses, which he assumed had already been passed and sent to County for payment. Today was the deadline. His mind raced. What the hell was Skinner doing with them?
‘Are they my car expenses?’ he asked. ‘They’ve got to be at County today, otherwise I don’t get paid until next month.’
Mullett shuffled some papers again and studied the top of his desk. He looked hopefully at Skinner, but Skinner was waiting for Mullett to reply. ‘They’re not going off to County, I’m afraid,’ Mullett said eventually, carefully avoiding Frost’s eyes.
‘Oh? And why not?’ demanded Frost.
This time Skinner answered. ‘Because most of these receipts appear to have been falsified.’ He spread them out on the desk in front of Frost.
‘Falsified?’ shrilled Frost in as indignant a tone as he could muster, while his brain raced through the data bank of his memory, wondering where the hell he had gone wrong. ‘Don’t tell me those lousy garages have been fiddling the amounts and I’ve missed it?’
‘I very much doubt that it is the garages that have been doing the falsifying,’ said Skinner, while Mullett, a smug smile on his face, nodded his agreement.
‘And just what is that supposed to mean?’ said Frost.
Skinner smashed a fist down on Mullett’s desk and the glass ashtray leapt into the air, crashing down in another ash storm. ‘Don’t come the bloody innocent with me, Frost. You know damn well what I mean. The majority of these receipts have been altered in your favour. And I’m saying that you altered them.’
‘If you think that, then flaming well prove it,’ snapped Frost, hoping and praying that the fat sod couldn’t.
Skinner leant back in his chair and smiled the smile of a fat sod who had four aces in his hand and a couple of kings to back them up. He took a receipt from the pile and waved it at Frost. ‘I asked Forensic to examine this one. “20 litres” has been crudely altered to read “26 litres”.’
Frost exhaled a sigh of relief. By sheer, undeserved good luck, Skinner had picked the one receipt that was genuine. It had already been altered, so he had been unable to alter it again. ‘If you check with the garage, you will find that the cashier misread the pump reading and had to alter it afterwards.’ He grabbed Mullett’s phone and thrust it at the Chief Inspector. ‘Go on. Phone them and ask.’ He stood up. ‘And when they confirm it, you can come to my office and apologise.’ Attack, he knew, was the best form of defence.
He had hardly reached the door when Skinner roared, ‘Sit down! I haven’t finished with you yet. Then how do you explain this?’
Frost slumped back in his chair and looked at the petrol receipt pinned to the desktop by Skinner’s finger. His heart sank. ‘What about it?’ he asked, knowing damn well that if the bastard had checked he would know too bloody well what it was about.
The bastard had checked. ‘A bit off the beaten track, like most of the garages you choose to use, but I took a ride down there. The site was deserted. Elm Tree Garage has been closed for over two years.’
Frost’s brain raced, churning this over. Sod it! He’d been getting too flaming careless. Mullett was so easy to fool, especially when he was caught on the hop and made to sign expense claims he didn’t have time to check first. Sod, sod and double sod. He’d meant to throw those old blank receipt forms away ages ago. Stupid, stupid fool! ‘I don’t know how that happened,’ he muttered. ‘I must have tucked the receipt in my wallet ages ago and got it mixed up with the current ones.’ He peered at Skinner to see how this was going down. It wasn’t going anywhere!
Skinner was shaking his head. ‘With a current date?’
‘I probably noticed the date was wrong, so I put a new one in,’ offered Frost, trying to suggest it was the most natural thing to do with an old receipt.
Smirking superciliously, and staring at Frost as he did so, Skinner began to line up a series of petrol receipts on the desktop as if he was displaying a Royal Flush ‘And you did the same for these other five Elm Tree Garage receipts. How do you account for that?’
Frost wriggled uncomfortably in his chair. ‘All right. So I lost some receipts and altered some others so I wouldn’t lose out. Big deal!’
Skinner scooped up the receipts and put them back on the pile. ‘If it had only happened once – or perhaps twice, or even in single figures – I might be disposed to believe you, Inspector Frost, but I’ve gone back six months and could go back even further. A sizeable number have been altered. By my calculations you’ve been making almost forty pounds a month from falsified car-expense claims.’
‘And tax-free,’ chimed in Mullett, who felt he was being left out of things.
‘Yes,’ agreed Skinner grimly. He turned to Mullett and nodded for him to take over.
Mullett had the grace not to look Frost in the eye. ‘I won’t tolerate dishonesty in my division.’
‘Dishonesty?’ exclaimed Frost incredulously. ‘What bloody dishonesty? Half the overtime I can’t be bothered to claim would wipe this out in a flash.’
Mullett turned in appeal to Skinner. He hadn’t considered this aspect. Don’t say Frost was going to wriggle out of it, as he always seemed able to do.
Skinner took over. ‘You can’t write off fiddling like that. Forgery is forgery. If you’re too lazy to claim overtime, that’s your look-out. You can’t make up for it by fiddling.’
All right, thought Frost. When you’ve lost, stop fighting. ‘So I might have made the odd mistake. Big deal. If it makes you happy, I’ll pay it back.’